THE ARTIFICIAL USE OF HUMAN BEINGS Tom Griffiths Tom Griffiths is Henry R. Luce Professor of Information, Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He is co-author (with Brian Christian) of Algorithms to Live By. When you ask people to imagine a world that has successfully, beneficially incorporated advances in artificial intelligence, everybody probably comes up with a slightly different picture. Our idiosyncratic visions of the future might differ in the presence or absence of spaceships, flying cars, or humanoid robots. But one thing doesn’t vary: the presence of human beings. That’s certainly what Norbert Wiener imagined when he wrote about the potential of machines to improve human society by interacting with humans and helping to mediate their interactions with one another. Getting to that point doesn’t just require coming up with ways to make machines smarter. It also requires a better understanding of how human minds work. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have resulted in systems that can meet or exceed human abilities in playing games, classifying images, or processing text. But if you want to know why the driver in front of you cut you off, why people vote against their interests, or what birthday present you should get for your partner, you’re still better off asking a human than a machine. Solving those problems requires building models of human minds that can be implemented inside a computer— something that’s essential not just to better integrate machines into human societies but to make sure that human societies can continue to exist. Consider the fantasy of having an automated intelligent assistant that can take on such basic tasks as planning meals and ordering groceries. To succeed in these tasks, it needs to be able to make inferences about what you want, based on the way you behave. Although this seems simple, making inferences about the preferences of human beings can be a tricky matter. Fo